Spokesman of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), Dr.Hakeem Baba-Ahmed does not agree with the position of the Southern Governors during their recent meeting in Asaba,Delta State,that power should return to the south in 2023.In this interview with Correspondent ABDULGAFAR ALABELEWE, the onetime INEC Secretary says anyone wishing to rule Nigeria should go round the country and persuade the electorate on why they should vote for him. Baba-Ahmed ,a strident critic of President Muhammadu Buhari, says he has failed woefull in running the affairs of the country,citing the poor state of the economy and the security challenge.He claims the president’s style gave rise to the emergence of the likes of Sunday Igboho and Nnamdi Kanu. Excerpts:
How do you assess the state of Nigeria today? Do you see light at the end of the tunnel or are you discouraged about the nation’s prospects?
There is always light at the end of the tunnel, but whether we discover that light or whether it actually leads us to the way out of the tunnel is a different thing. The country is in very serious trouble; we have very poor leadership at all levels. It is quite possible we have never had the kind of leadership that we have today and there doesn’t appear to be a political will to address the challenge. The nation has achieved a lot. It is when we muster these energies, tap into a huge amount of experiences and insights and commitment to salvage the nation and then create awareness among Nigerians that we can recover Nigeria and build it. It appears there no such will. And one consequence of that is that there is an unprecedented level of dejection, lack of faith in leaders and very widespread questioning of the viability of the Nigerian state, particularly among young people who have no idea about what it took to build this country, what it took to put it together and what it will take to turn it around.
So, yes, there could be light at the end of the tunnel, but it has to be lit by someone and unfortunately, it is not President Muhammadu Buhari or this current legislature. And organizations and groups like ours, the Northern Elders Forum, work with other groups from other parts of the country and what we see among our groups is that there are tendencies that want to play to the gallery and the wrong galleries, negative galleries, tap into negative energy to whip up sentiments that further undermine the foundations of this country and unfortunately, they fail to play the role of leadership.
The politicians are the lowest kind of politicians we have ever had.They are completely lacking in leadership qualities.They don’t want to play the hard game of politics; they want easy pickings and they hide behind criminals and thugs and other people who use violence to create fear and they seek to attain short term goals that are dangerous, and to be honest, impossible to achieve. That is the way I see the state of the nation.
In the course of his interviews around May 29 President Buhari said Nigerians were not fair to him and his government considering where the country was when he took over. Do you agree?
Well, I listened to that interview too, but the statement was as hollow as many statements he has made. That is the kind of things that people write for him to read. For me, there are clear criteria for President Buhari to assess himself, that is if only he would accept he is accountable to Nigerians; that how he performs is important to him. In terms of the security of the country, we are a lot worse than we were in 2015. I was part of the build and the campaign of President Buhari; I know what he inherited and I saw him mismanage even that opportunity to rebuild the country and now we have a lot more security challenges than we had in 2015; the country is a lot worse. So, I don’t know what his definition of fairness is, unless he just wants people who have become victims of crimes and violence to just say thank you very much sir for claiming doing the job that you have not even done. But, we judge him by how many people are kidnapped by the day; how many people are murdered by the day; how many people are pushed away from their homes, villages and their farm lands; and we judge him by the threat to the security and integrity of the nation. Those are the criteria by which we judge him. So, I think when he says things like we are not fair to him, he merely reads the speeches, but he doesn’t read the country.
The economy is also a lot worse. We have lived on a lie for the last five, six years.We keep borrowing money, money that even our grandchildren will pay and all these false claims that the economy is doing well and we know that it is not true, I wish there are other people who could also tell him that we are already in very serious trouble, our economy is in a mess, there is unemployment at an unprecedented level, there is poverty at an unbelievably high level, young people can’t find jobs to do and farming is under serious threat in this country because of insecurity. So, by what yardstick is the president going to say to Nigerians that he has done better in terms of the economy? So, when we put these two things together alone, just security and economy, President Buhari has no heroism to claim any credit for anything he has done, other than the fact that he has woefully led this country. He didn’t do it alone, he did along with a lot of governors in his party and in the PDP who have collaborated with him to foist on the nation the lowest level of leadership that we have ever witnessed and the National Assembly that has decided to become a puddle National Assembly to betray the trust and confidence of Nigerians who have sent them to do serious job for this country. When you put all these things together,and then look at all these quarrels, we have never had all this kind of rhetoric about irredentism, secession, and we don’t want to be part of this country.
Closely linked to the issue of insecurity is the unity of the country. Colonel Abubakar Dangiwa Umar recently said President Muhammad Buhari has mismanaged Nigeria’s diversity. What is your take on this?
I agree with him. This issue of our diversity is a permanent feature of Nigeria. There is no level of integration that you will achieve that will eliminate the tendencies for some people to think they don’t belong or they don’t belong sufficiently. However, there is a threshold you must never cross. For instance, every president runs a circle around him, the circle should demonstrate some commitment to inclusion and competence; you can achieve those two, you actually can bring people from your village, your ethnic group but you must also bring people from other parts of the country and build a good team that looks to Nigerians as if it is actually a representation of them. He has failed to do that, he has failed to address issues that give chance to irredentists, secessionists, adventurers and killers who ride on this idea that this part of the country does not belong to Nigeria and he has failed to reach out and find a way to integrate them into mainstream political system; that is his job.
You cannot be indifferent to sentiments in the Southeast; you cannot be indifferent to what is happening in the Southwest and still hope that you can run a safe and secure country.You ought to have detected this a long time ago and move to nip it in the bud and assure communities that will ordinarily feel that people like Igboho and Kanu have a case to make; they have no case to make. Every element and every community in Nigeria has been sidelined by incompetence, by indifference and by a president who doesn’t think that it is his job to perform the political role of a leader. So that is the mismanagement that people talk about. It is sad and tragic that we are where we are today when we should be stronger politically.We are not.
One major challenge facing the country, especially the North, is insecurity. The Northwest is almost being overrun by bandits. What’s at the root of the problem and what is the way out?
The roots are not as deep as they should be.Ten, twelve years ago, we began to see manifestation of a phenomenon that was very strange:the Fulani were marginalized;they are partly out of choice, partly out of lifestyle and there has been a long history of injustice against the Fulani in the Northern part of the country. But we began to see a phenomenon where the Fulani were systematically being separated from their cattle and the relationship between the rural Hausa and Fulani began to sour and we began to see emergence of some elements of banditry around cattle rustling and attacking villages and fight between farmers and cattle herders. This wasn’t there at all. The long term effect of what was going on in parts of Kaduna and Zamfara made things to escalate. A good government would have moved in quickly to seek to understand what is going on, seek to find out what can be done to find a way in which this can be limited and eventually eliminated, but this is not a good government.
In fairness to President Buhari, it didn’t start under him, it started under President Goodluck Jonathan, perhaps going back to long history but the intensification dates back to say ten to twelve years ago. Nobody did anything about this. Eventually more and more Fulani became separated from their cattle. When you separate a herder from his cattle, you drive him into hopelessness and depression; he moves into the forest, which is their natural terrain, takes up arms against each other and against rural Hausa, starts sacking villages and this is how this thing started. But we never saw a strong resolve from the federal government and the state governments to do anything about this until it brought us to where we are now that virtually every route has been taken over by bandits, kidnappers and criminal elements and unemployment is feeding this. Young people who have nothing to do are sitting back for this kind of crime. Now we have an industry that is booming in the country centered around criminality and use of violence and a huge population are now under the influence of bandits. We have Boko Haram which has not been eliminated by President Buhari as he promised and in addition we now have a phenomenon where you are not safe anywhere: on the road, at home, on the farm, in your village, in the cities. No one is safe. The situation, as it is, is unprecedented and what is even more worrying about the situation is that you don’t see anything on ground that suggests to you that this government intends to improve or change the way in which it is dealing with banditry and crime rate. They have taken their eyes off insecurity, they have taken their eyes off fixing the economy, they are all focused on 2023. So this problem will not be solved because politicians are going to become increasingly engrossed with gaining power in 2023.Ask them what they are going to do with this power, will it be enough to fix this country? Will the country not be a lot worse between now and 2023? What are they going to do? No one is paying attention to what is going on now. Sadly President Buhari still has one and a half years to go and these governors have one and a half years to go. They think they can fix this problem by 2023 when they fight each other, maybe destroy the country in the process just so that they can become governors and president. That is what is frightening about this.
Zamfara Governor Matawalle said the problems of the North are down to lack of visionary leadership. Do you agree?
I wish that statement came from somebody other than someone that just left the party that gave him mandate to become governor and just walked into another party. But, he is right, our politicians are not interested in governance, they are not interested in improving the lot of the people, they just want power, and he is not qualified to speak about this kind of things because his state is one of the worst ravaged states in the country, and he just suddenly walked out of his party with the mandate that was given to him before he walked to a different party. He is right in terms of the statement, but he is the least qualified person to have made that statement.
Now, looking at the security challenge of banditry, do you think the military approach alone can solve this problem?
No, if you are talking about straight forward military assault on bandits that has scattered to virtually across the whole land of the North and across the parts of Nigeria, this is not the fight for military alone.
This administration needs to consult those who have some insight into what is going on, they need to reinforce tactics and institutions. At grassroots level, they need to massively increase the capacity of the military, the police, the SSS. We need to revisit the security structure of this country. There is a case made for sub-national policing. This is vital to the survival of this country. You need to be inventive and imaginative. We need to fight against this banditry and kidnapping with a lot more than the bullet of the military and the virtually non-existent police. Right now, the bandits can go anywhere and do want ever that want to, and they are increasing by the day; their capacities are increasing, their audacity is increasing by the day and all you see are timid responses by the Nigerian states. Citizens have become increasingly pressurized, students can’t stay in school, farmers can’t go to farm, communities sleep with their eyes open. What will the country be like in the next one year, when politicians become completely engrossed with politics and wanting to be president, governors and senators? What will the country be like?
Related to this problem are clashes between herders and farmers across the country. Southern governors have agreed on open grazing ban while Buhari prefers reviving the grazing routes. Which is better?
The southern governors need to understand that while the Land Use Act gives them power over the use of land, they also have responsibilities to make sure that they use those powers responsibly and constructively. You can ban open grazing, you should ban open grazing. There’s hardly anybody in this country who would say they don’t support banning of open grazing. We in the Northern Elders Forum have said it so many times and virtually everybody has said so. But we need to adopt a process that allows open grazing to be replaced by a system that gives security to the cattle and to the herder and security to the country. As it is now, it is causing too much security challenge to the country and it doesn’t need to be and so President Buhari’s position about opening grazing routes, I’m afraid again, is one of those things that makes you wonder whether the president is aware that we are living in the year 2021,
The Land Use Act can be invoked by the governors and literally overnight they can simply repeal grazing routes and grazing reserves if they choose to and therefore the federal government has no recourse to opening up these facilities which is not the way to go. If the President believes that it is the responsible thing to do ,talk to the governors to allow a period and a system that allows for a transition from open grazing to non- open grazing, maybe ranching. He should engage these governors. If the governors believe that open grazing represents a threat to the president, they should engage the president, they should say to him, Mr. President please read the Constitution. Actually utilization is vested in us and we do not want you to come and start laying claims and creating the impression that Fulani can transverse the length and breadth of this country simply because you believe that 30, 40, 50 years ago, there were cattle routes and grazing grounds. They don’t exist anymore. Even if they do, this is not the way to go about them.
The tragedy is that the president is not talking to the people and to the governors, so the Governors are not talking to the President and the consequence of this is that we are not finding solutions . Since the Federal Government has already evolved some strategies like the National Livestock Transformation Program, it is there in the office of the Vice President, why can’t we work towards this? How come we are now talking about something that we stopped 40, 50 years ago? And the President in 2021 is telling his Minister of Justice to dust up all grazing routes and reserves in a part of the country which is extremely hostile to Fulani. Even if you can retrieve the grazing reserves and cattle routes, how much of security can you provide for the herders who use the routes and reserves? So, this brings us back to the issue of the failure of leadership. Buhari is not leading; if he is, he will be actively engaged in this and engage the governors.
And if the southern governors are serious about providing effective leadership, they should know they also have a responsibility to the Fulani herders. The fact that there is Fulani and that he lives in their states does not mean he has no right; it doesn’t mean that he is not entitled to some protection. So, drawing a line that by September, we don’t want to see cattle, what happens to the hundreds of thousands of cattle in the southern part of the country? What about the lie that the southern governors are peddling as if all the cows belong to only Fulani? A huge percentage of the cows in the southern part of the country belong to the southerners, but they give you the impression that everyone you see belongs to the Fulani. Are you providing for your own people? Because the Fulani can, under pressure, return to the North.
What about the northern governors? Why are they not engaging the northern governors where there is a huge amount of land, a huge amount of water resources? Get them to commit, also in collaboration with the federal government, to develop ranching facilities or to provide alternative to open grazing. Why is the Federal Government not engaging the governors? Why are the northern governors not living up to what they should be doing, showing primary concern for the fate of Fulani? Most of them are northerners. Why are the northern governors abandoning them? Why are the southern governors being opportunistic and being so irresponsible?
What is happening about leadership in this country? And these are the same people who want to come back and govern this country again. Can you imagine what will happen to this country again from 2023? Can you imagine what will happen to this country, assuming we survive till 2023?
There has been an upsurge in secessionist agitation. But people say that the bandits pose a greater threat than the likes of IPOB’s Kanu and Sunday Igboho.
I don’t have the skill that you are using if you make that assumption. I know that Kanu and Igboho represent strong and very powerful divisive tendencies; they threaten the unity and integrity of this country and anybody who has sworn by the Qur’an or Bible to protect the territorial integrity of this country, to protect the unity of this country, to enhance the coexistence of Nigerians , cannot be indifferent to the fact that both Kanu and Igboho are engaged in large scale activities that threaten lives of Nigerians, including the constituencies that appear to be cheering them up.
Secession is illegal; trying to break this country up is illegal. Now, if you want to compare bandits with Igboho and Kanu, I will still tell you my own view. Both of them are just bandits, committing banditry in different ways. When a man will sit down using radio and then ordering thousands of Nigerians to keep people of the five eastern states at home at the risk of being attacked or maimed or killed or whatever, what do you call that? That means you are tying down millions of innocent people at home using the threat of violence.
When Igboho uses words that threaten everybody, particularly the Fulani people who are not Yoruba and uses rhetoric that sends signal that a whole section of the country is going to opt out, without a single person’s mandate. He doesn’t have the mandate to pull Yoruba out of this country; he doesn’t have the legitimacy to do this. He uses rhetoric that instills fear and hatred; it is illegal to do that. The bandits that kidnap people, close down schools, rape women everywhere are just the same ; they are all using the same thing.
What this country is going through is the emergence of criminality that has taken over the lives of millions of Nigerians. That is where we are. So, I don’t want to get into this issue of which one is worse, but any Nigerian who uses force, who uses weapon to terrorise Nigerians whether he is Kanu or Igboho or bandit or kidnapper, he is a threat to Nigerians and the Nigerian state should move against them. If you catch them, put them through the legal process. This is why I support the prosecution of Igboho, I support the prosecution of Kanu, the prosecution of bandits and kidnappers and anybody else who threatens or uses violence against Nigerians, and it must stop.
The biggest weakness of this government is that it allows this kind of thing to grow and grow until it reaches a point where dealing with them now becomes a political issue. Look at what is happening now: the Southwest is lining up, a huge number of people including people who have sworn to protect the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The same thing in the Southeast, people including governors are lining up behind Kanu; people who would privately tell you, we are terrified of the man, if we don’t do what they want, they will attack us. Now, how do you justify this? What about the oath you took? Does it mean that the Constitution means nothing to you at all? How do people look up to you for protection if you are afraid of a criminal? Because it is basically fear; politicians that are afraid of the forces they created. They thought Igboho and Kanu will deliver to them a southern president. And now the monsters they created are now coming back to haunt them. Now, the Federal Government has got them, they are now being prosecuted and the same people that were terrified are now coming back to say no, no don’t arrest him, don’t prosecute him. What do you want us to do to people who have threatened the citizens, the security, caused death and destruction? What do you want us to do? Give them national honours?
Some people have argued that Nigeria can only move forward through restructuring or decentralisation. What’s your view?
No! We need two things: we need to restructure the structures themselves, that is what type of federal system do we have?What type of federating units do we require? How do we share resources of the country? How do we address concern of grievances and resentments? How do we improve efficiency? How do we address corruption? How do you address insecurity? How do we reduce cost of governance? How do you address this idea that the country belongs to the part of the country where the president comes from? These are fundamental issues that deal with the structures.
We also need quality leadership that will restructure the country. Too often, we tend to think that all we need to do is restructure the country. The major challenge for Nigeria is that we have poor leadership. Even the poor leadership will run Nigeria fairly well. Clearly, a good leadership will also say let us change. Change must be a constant process in this country. We must constantly revisit the way Nigeria is run. We must change things as we move, and that is part of being a good leader.
So, my response to the question as to whether restructuring alone is enough is, no.We need to do two things: we need to radically improve quality of leadership as well as address fundamental limitations to the way the Nigerian federal system operates. That is in everybody’s interest, everyone will gain from this. But it takes a good leader to recognize it and move to do it. This is the problem for Nigeria now. You have a president who says no, I don’t know what restructuring is; if you people are talking about constitutional amendment, go to the National Assembly. Then, you have a National Assembly that will tell you: well, we don’t think this is the right thing to do, because President Buhari is not very comfortable with it. This country doesn’t belong to President Buhari, it doesn’t belong to members of the National Assembly.They will all go, but this country remains, then what happens to the country?
By the day, our problems are mounting, they are getting worse. What kind of nation are our children going to live in? They hate each other; they live on social media; they use scary language because they were taught nothing other than to hate each other; they know nothing and nobody teaches them history. Nobody teaches children what the religion of the other faith stands for. So, all they know about each other are abuses and insults they throw at each other on social media, that is all.They hate each other. Are these people going to live in the same country if you don’t address the problems of this country?
I am telling you that going our separate ways now is going to be definitely better than having a country where 20 years down the road, we are going to have people who fight each other purely because they speak a different language or worship a different God. This is not the kind of legacies we want to leave for our children and we have a chance to fix this and the time is now.
The 2023 general elections are fast approaching, do you agree that after eight years of rule by a northerner, power should shift to the South as demanded by southern governors?
Power does not return or go anywhere, power is determined by voters; this is why we have a democratic process, we are a democratic country. Voters should decide who they want to vote for. Since 1999, Nigerians have been voting.We voted a southern president in 1999 to 2007, we then voted a northern president in 2007 who ruled for only two years and a southern president completed his tenure and was voted again in 2011. Then, we voted a northern president in 2015. In all these times, it was the power of the voters that determined who became the President.Votes don’t carry regional connotation.The democratic process says Nigerians should exercise right, that every Nigerian above the age of 18 is qualified to vote for who they want to be president, that is it. You cannot arm-twist that provision.
We can agree, for instance, that party ‘A’ should field a northerner, party ‘B’ can decide to field a southerner or northerner. Politicians can decide in a room whether their candidate should be a southerner or northerner. What you cannot do is to insist that voters from the northern part of the country must vote a southern candidate or that all political parties must field southern candidates; you cannot do that, both legally and in practical terms, because we have many parties. If we have five parties and one of the parties fields a northern candidate and the northern candidate scores the highest votes, he becomes the President. You cannot force a voter to choose a candidate that is not his choice, just because the candidate comes from a particular region of the country. You cannot tie up northern voters completely and totally and say he must not vote for any party that fields a northerner for the position of the president. You need to persuade people, you need to do the hard work of politics.
People who believe that having a southern presidency is central to the survival of this country should, in the name of God ,get up do the real work of lobbying and politicking and persuade people that the future of this country is contingent on the emergence of a southern president. But, you cannot do it by threat, intimidation and blackmail. If you keep pushing this rhetoric that it must be southern president or we will leave this country or the heavens will fall, then northern voters will say, what about my right to choose whoever I want? What do you do with my right? How can you force me to choose a southerner if I have a choice to choose a northerner or southerner? That is the point we have been making. You cannot legislate this, it is not in the law. Even the PDP that has rotational presidency as part of its policy, go and see how many PDP governors have printed posters from the north who want to be president. So, even the PDP does not respect it. The point we are making is that if there are enough grounds, enough people who can do the hard work of persuading northerners or voters all over the country, fine, but they also need to tell us, assure Nigerians that, when people vote this person to become the President, he doesn’t become a southern or northern president, but a Nigerian president; we don’t want another tribal or regional president.
Nigeria is a very complex country. All these arguments we are making about lack of inclusion, abusing our diversity, have their roots in the way in which this president runs his government, people don’t feel they belong. And the same people who are saying they are not part of the Buhari’s government are now saying give us the presidency. So, shouldn’t we ask this question: if we now regionalize or ethnicise the presidency, is he going to be president for Nigeria or president for the southern part of the country? He is going to be president for Muslims or Christians? What kind of president is he going to be? This country needs to move on. We can produce a president that actually represents the interest of all Nigerians, but we appear to be going backward. And it is because we have lazy politicians; they are all looking for shortcuts to power, they are now raising this issue as if it is the single most important challenge facing this country and unfortunately, they are doing it the wrong way; they can persuade Nigerians but they chose not to.
Left for me, I think the real problem is not rotational presidency, the real problem is not whether we are a country of different ethnic groups, the real problem is that we have political leadership that is completely undeserving to be leading this country. Now, it has no place in the future, at all.
On a final note, despite all the criticism, are there any positives you see in six years of the Buhari administration?
No! And I say that with a lot of regrets. If there were, I would say so. I was among the tiny part of people who contributed to putting this man in power, and there were huge expectations.We genuinely believed that President Buhari would fix security, the economy and tackle corruption; he would give this country a new lease of life, that he would show leadership that would be different from Jonathan’s PDP administration.
We had very high hopes, particularly those of us in the North who were at the receiving end of Boko Haram insurgency at that time.We didn’t see any of those things. We have seen decline in the quality of leadership, we have seen decline in security, we have seen decline in the economy. If today I tell you, there are families in the northern part of the country in the rural north, which grows its own food and eat it, families that eat one meal a day, people will find that unbelievable, but it is the truth. If I tell you that there are women in some villages in parts of the north who sleep on trees at night because they are afraid that bandits will come in the night to take them away, people may not find that believable, it is the truth. If I tell you children leave home for school and their parents are not sure whether they will come back and that a large number of parents are removing their children from school in the north which desperately needs children, particularly the girl child to stay in school, some people will say that is not true. But, it is the truth.That is the reality we live in. If I tell you there are communities in the south that northerners cannot go to, some people will say it is not true, but the reality is that it is true. That is what the six years of Buhari administration has done to Nigeria.
It gives no pleasure, believe me honestly, I wish he has done the opposite, so that, I can be proud and say thank God, all the efforts we had put in 2003, 2004, 2005 has borne fruits, that we have shown that we can actually produce a good leader that would make a difference, but he has failed to do this and my major concern now is that, I am worried that the same administration is working to put another administration in power and the PDP is not any better; PDP just wants to wrestle power from President Buhari and do exactly what Buhari is doing, that is the tragedy for this country.
